SEO Tips
How much does SEO cost in the UK?
Owen Measures · · Updated · 8 min read
Ask five SEO companies what they charge and you will get five different answers, most of which only arrive after a discovery call. It is the least transparent corner of an already murky industry, and it is why so many business owners give up and assume SEO is something other people can afford.
So here are the actual numbers. What SEO costs in the UK, what you get at each price, and what the figure on your quote is really buying.
The short answer
Most UK small businesses pay £250 to £800 a month for ongoing SEO, or £550 to £1,500 for a one off audit and the fixes that follow it.
Below £250 a month for SEO on its own, on a site somebody else built, you are usually buying automation rather than a person. Above about £2,000 you are usually paying for an agency's overheads rather than more work on your site. There are honest exceptions at both ends, but that is where the bulk of small business work sits.
What an SEO audit costs
A one off audit is where most businesses should start, and it typically runs £550 to £1,500 depending on the size of the site.
An audit is not a PDF, or it should not be. A useful one tells you what is technically broken, which of your pages are competing against each other, what your competitors rank for that you do not, and which fixes are worth doing first. The priority list is the deliverable that matters. The page count is not.
Be careful with free audits. They are automated crawls with a sales call attached, and the recommendations are generic because nobody actually looked at your site. I run a free SEO and AEO audit myself, so read that as disclosure as much as advice. The difference worth looking for is whether every finding is measured from your actual pages and checkable, or whether the same PDF goes to everyone.
What ongoing SEO costs each month
UK monthly retainers for small businesses fall into roughly three bands.
£150 to £250 a month buys light upkeep. Someone keeps an eye on things, fixes what breaks, perhaps publishes the odd post. That is fine if your foundations are already solid and you only want them maintained.
£250 to £600 a month is the realistic band for an active local campaign. Ongoing technical work, content, Google Business Profile management and proper reporting. This is where most small businesses should be sitting.
£600 to £1,500 a month covers competitive markets, more content and link building. Worth it when a single customer is worth four figures to you and the competition is genuinely fighting.
Above that you are into full agency territory at £1,500 to £5,000 a month, which makes sense for national ecommerce and almost never for a local trade.
What local SEO costs
Local SEO tends to be cheaper, because there is less ground to cover and fewer people fighting over it.
Expect £250 to £500 a month if you serve a specific area. A good chunk of that work happens on your Google Business Profile rather than your website, which is a completely free tool that most businesses have half filled in and then forgotten about. I have written a full guide to getting your business on Google Maps if you want to tackle that part yourself.
If you are a single location business with a decent website already, local SEO is one of the highest return things you can spend money on.
What actually moves the price
Two quotes can look similar and mean completely different things. These are the factors that make the difference.
Where you are starting from. A site with clean technical foundations needs far less work than one built badly in 2019 and patched ever since. Sometimes the audit is the cheap part and the fixing is not.
How competitive your market is. Ranking a plumber in Rochester is a different job to ranking a solicitor in London. The same work, a wildly different amount of it. My free keyword ideas tool shows what people actually search for around your service, which is a quick way to gauge your own market before anyone quotes you.
Whether content is included. This is the biggest hidden variable. Writing genuinely useful content is slow, and a lot of cheap retainers quietly exclude it, or fill the gap with AI output that nobody reads and Google increasingly ignores.
Whether anyone implements the fixes. Some SEO is advice. Some is advice plus somebody actually doing the work. Check which one you are buying, because a list of recommendations you have no time to action is worth nothing at all.
Reporting. Less a cost driver than a quality signal. If nobody can show you rankings, traffic and enquiries in plain English every month, ask why not.
Why the cheapest quote is usually the most expensive
The packages to walk away from are the cheap SEO-only ones that promise page one in weeks. They exist and they advertise heavily. Google's own guidance on hiring an SEO is blunt about that: no one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.
What you get is automated tooling, spun content, and link building that ranges from useless to actively harmful. Recovering from bad links takes longer and costs more than doing nothing ever would have, and Google has no interest in the fact that you were trying to save money.
The arithmetic gives it away. At UK rates a very cheap SEO-only package buys about an hour a month, and an hour a month cannot win rankings for a site nobody has fixed. Keeping a site in good order is a different job when the same person built it properly to begin with, which is why my Standard monthly plan includes up to an hour of changes and SEO upkeep but never promises a ranking.
How long before it pays for itself
Three to six months for meaningful movement. That is the honest answer rather than the comfortable one.
The first month is usually audit and technical fixes, which produce nothing you can see. Months two and three go on content and on page work. Somewhere around month four you start seeing positions shift on terms that actually matter, and enquiries follow after that.
Anyone promising results in weeks is either selling you paid advertising and calling it SEO, or is about to do something you will have to undo later.
The useful exercise is to do the maths on your own numbers. If a customer is worth £800 to you and SEO costs £300 a month, it pays for itself at roughly five extra customers a year. For most local businesses that is a low bar.
What I charge
Foundation SEO, titles, meta descriptions, alt text, correct heading structure and a submitted sitemap, is included free with every build I do. WebOws Advanced, hand written schema and breadcrumb markup with a written record of what was added and why, is a one off from £300. On the monthly plans, Standard SEO keeps Foundation and Advanced up every month, from £100 a month after a £99 setup fee, with a 12-month minimum. WebOws Performance SEO comes with the Performance monthly plans, from £200 a month.
GEO, meaning your business gets referenced by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI overviews when someone asks them for a recommendation, sits inside Performance rather than as a separate add-on. Most agencies are not thinking about that yet, and it is quietly becoming the thing that matters.
Websites are either a monthly plan, £199 to start then from £100 a month with a 12-month minimum, or a Wix site bought outright from £800, and I have written about what a website costs in the UK if that is the real question behind this one. Everything is laid out on the pricing page, and there is more detail on what the work involves on my SEO and digital marketing page.
If you want a straight number for your own site rather than a range, get in touch or call 01634 984929. Free conversation, no hard sell, and you will get a fixed quote rather than an estimate.
Frequently asked questions
How much does SEO cost per month in the UK?
Between £250 and £800 a month for most small businesses buying SEO on its own. Under £250 for SEO alone usually means automated tools rather than a person, and over £1,500 usually means you are paying for an agency's structure rather than more work on your site. A monthly website plan that includes SEO upkeep, like mine from £100 a month on a 12-month minimum, is priced differently because the site, the hosting and the SEO are one job.
Is SEO worth it for a small business?
If your customers find you by searching, yes. If your work comes entirely from referrals and repeat custom, possibly not, and anyone honest will tell you so rather than take your money. Work out what one new customer is worth to you and the answer usually becomes obvious.
How much does an SEO audit cost?
£550 to £1,500 for a proper one, depending on the size of your site. Free audits are automated and generic. What you are paying for is somebody looking at your site properly and telling you which three things actually matter.
Can I do SEO myself?
Some of it, and you should. Fill in your Google Business Profile properly, ask happy customers for reviews, and write honestly about what you do. That covers a surprising amount of ground for free. The technical side and the competitor research is where paying somebody earns its keep.
Why do SEO prices vary so much?
Because SEO is not one service. One quote might be a monthly report and a few tweaks. Another might be a person doing technical work, writing content and managing your local listings every month. Ask exactly what is being done and the prices start making sense.
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